


What He Would Have Wanted

by therealraewest



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Character Death, Comfort/Angst, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Other, i'm not even sorry, platonic/romantic conflicts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 17:03:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4754183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therealraewest/pseuds/therealraewest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eiffel has already said that it's his wish that Hera gets his toys if he dies, but you should always be careful what you wish for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What He Would Have Wanted

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate timeline, events take place after Lets Kill Hilbert but before Minkowski Commanding

_"If I die, Hera gets all my toys."_

\--

 

            "I don't know if it's any consolation," Minkowski said, her voice a forced calm, "But he'd have wanted you to have first claim to anything of his on the station."

            There was a pronounced silence, so the Commander continued. "It's not much; a spare jumpsuit, a few personal tools, whatever cigarettes he had stashed away somewhere-"

            "H-H-He ran out of cigarettes," Hera interrupted, almost sharply. "He used his last one last Chri-Christmas."

            "Oh," said Minkowski quietly. "That... makes sense. I hadn't seen him with any since, but I guess I figured-"

            "You figured wrong."

            There was another pronounced silence, but this one left Minkowski unsure of what else to say. She opened her mouth a couple times as if to continue, but the words always died before they had a chance to get past her lips.

            "It wasn't anybody's fault," she said finally. "Sometimes things just-"

            "Honestly, Commander, I see no reason to keep talking about this. Ther-There's plenty of wor-work to be done and if we're g-g-go-going to sit around talk-lking all day about-ut-t-t-t-" Hera's speech dissolved into a skipping track, reminding Minkowski of a scratched CD. Except when a cd skipped it wasn't on the brink of an emotional meltdown that could end in the death of the remaining crew members on this God-forsaken station.

            "Hera," Minkowski said, her voice harsh. Realizing her tone, she softened, saying again "Hera."

            The skipping stopped, and after a few tense seconds of silence the AI said "I'm. Fine."

            "No," considered Minkowski. "I don't think any of us are, really."

            "I. Am. Fi-fi-fine!" Hera insisted, her voice raising in volume. "I am a perfectly capable Artificial Intelli-elligence Unit and I am NOT going to be IMPEDED in m-my JOB because one of the pi-pitiful, gelatinous m-m-meatbags-gs in my care couldn't even manage-age to keep his own he-heart beat-beat-beating!"

            "Hera!" shouted Minkowski, but Hera was done with that particular conversation. She blocked out Minkowski's yelling as she focused the part of her consciousness that wasn't working on the million things needed to keep the station from falling apart on another part of the craft. She had the instant realization, however, that she didn't know where she wanted to go. There was only one person she wanted to talk to, and that was the person she would never-

            No. She couldn't even let herself finish that thought. She fled along the first pathway that presented itself, after making sure it wasn't back to Minkowski or up to the Observation Deck where Hilbert would be. Her optic came online and she looked at her choice spot, only to internally grimace.

            She'd meant to direct herself to one of the boiler rooms. It would be empty and distant enough that she could talk to herself without being heard. Unfortunately, the pathways in her processor were still mixed up enough that she had, somehow, come to one of the last places she wanted to be- Eiffel's private quarters.

            It was a messy room, compared to the rest of the station. Eiffel kept the room teetering on jumbled enough to feel 'homey' as he put it, while not allowing the mess to float out into areas where Minkowski would see and demand for him to clean his space. There was a pen and pad of paper floating beside the bed, with caricatures of his crew members scribbled on the pages that fanned out from the cardboard backing. There were some empty wrappers from nutrition packs in one of the corners, floating together into an amorphous rubbish sphere that he'd affectionately called 'trash planet.' There was a well-handled magazine floating in the closet beneath his spare jumpsuit and various undershirts. The walls were decorated with taped papers holding some of his favorite pictures, including several pictures he'd tried to draw of her. Not that she had a physical appearance outside of a large number of circuits inside a central processor, but he had always tried visualize her somehow. He was funny that way.

            The room's contents didn't seem like much to Hera, though it was more than the others had. Life on a space station didn't allow for much in the ways of personal belongings, but the room had it's own, very Eiffel-ish feeling to it. She couldn't place it, exactly, but a part of her still expected her optic to pan over to the bed and see Officer Eiffel lounging, eyes to the ceiling as he called "Hera? Can you hear me?"

            She hadn't heard him, in the end. Not at the very end. He'd gone out of reach of the helmet-to-helmet coms, and they hadn't managed to catch him in his last, probably terrified, moments. She'd seen him, though. Hadn't been able to tear her sensors away as they tracked him. She'd felt when his heart had stopped. Felt the empty, felt the silence. _Hera? Can you hear me?_

            She felt cramped. The room was far too small. It was too small and too bright and too empty and despite none of these things being able to actually effect her, she fled. She needed somewhere else, somewhere bigger-

            Well, she got bigger. The Observatory was bigger than the quarters, but again it wasn't where she wanted to be. Hilbert would have no way of knowing her focus was there, surely, but in this state... No. Minkowski wanted him alive.

            Well, she wanted Officer Eiffel alive. Sometimes you don't get what you want.

            She wondered what the doctor thought of the incident. He hadn't been a part of the mission, but surely Minkowski had informed him of what had happened. If nothing else, he'd probably heard Hera's screaming and gathered the events from that. She wondered if he'd felt anything. He'd lost a lab rat, that was for sure. But what else? A colleague? A friend? Or something else, something Hera didn't have words for?

            There were a lot of words nobody gave her. There were words not invented yet to describe things she saw and sensed and experienced. There were gaps in her vocabulary too big for anything in any language they'd programmed into her, and whatever cold was numbing her was one of the things she would spend the rest of her days trying to name. She wouldn't share the name she came up with for this, however. The names for colors in the sun that couldn't be seen by humans, those she would share. She didn't know how, exactly, but she felt that given the chance she would tell someone of those names, whenever she came up with them. The name for this though, the cold numbness mixed with scalding anger and a very noticeable and pressing void - that she wouldn't share. No, that she would scream out at the heavens for nobody to hear, for the waves of it to echo off of distant stars and even sink into the one so very close, into the red-orange depths of the star that had enveloped the only one she would have wanted to tell that particular word. Maybe she'd steer the station directly into the center of the star so she could use its radiation to transmit whatever word she created into the heavens, riding on waves of light through the cosmos. _Can you hear me?_

She looked down at Hilbert, wondering which of her failsafes she could exploit to kill him, and weighing the satisfaction that would be derived from each individual method. She could always finish up on that promise of liquid nitrogen on Christmas day. A spark in Officer Eiffel's quarters would set off her emergency protocols, and Hilbert had no way of stopping her this time. Or perhaps she could open the nearest airlock in an attempt to 'regulate the pressure' as she'd figured out in her previous incident with pressure regulation. That had been surprisingly easy, and no little men inside her head had even tried to stop her that time.

            A part of her wondered if some of the little men were still in there, or if her lobotomy had cut them out with the rest of her old self that she couldn't quite get back. She took a fraction of a second to figure out how to test that, and then she did, accessing the file detailing the content of Box 953. It took her a while to get the right box, however. Her first try ended in her receiving a full categorical list of items in the supply closet they'd once used as a brig. Her second try gave her every single chemical allotted to Doctor Hilbert for his stay as well as it's volume. Finally, on her... well, after more tries than she cared to admit, even to herself, she found the right path.

            There it was. The contents of Box 953, and nobody was even stopping her from thinking about it. Nobody was telling her she shouldn't see this, or that she needed a command level password to access it. As she observed the record, she had a twinge of gratefulness that the box had fallen into the star before Eiffel could open it. Another tinge of sadness and dramatic irony replaced this as she realized that the star was where Eiffel had ended up. Perhaps he had made his way to the box and its contents after all.

            The thought of being free of her failsafes suddenly didn't feel as sweet. Neither did the thought of permanently silencing another member of the crew, even a traitorous, deceiving ingrate who'd ripped her mind apart for no reason other than the fact that he could. Granted, thinking about that particular detail almost put her back in the mood for blood, but this time something else stopped her. More death would be the last thing Eiffel would have wanted. 'Team What's-Wrong-With-Handcuffs' and all that.

            Not that Eiffel was around to tell her what he wanted anymore. Not that she'd ever know what he truly wanted again.

            She pulled herself away from the Observatory, only to find her mind drawn to the communications room. It was empty. It was usually empty, except for the few hours a day Eiffel got around to actually doing his work or pretending to be productive. Well, that was a lie. It had used to be that way, but recently he spent more time there, trying to lock on to the flighty signals and get more information about them. Hera wondered who would do that, now. Minkowski, perhaps? Now with only one other crew member to manage and said crew member in mostly-solitary confinement, she didn't have much else to micromanage. Or would that job be assigned to Hera? It would take some programming - most of the communications tools Officer Eiffel had used were meant to be managed manually, and her circuitry was not directly wired in to some of the controls. She figured that was so Eiffel had the chance to actually feel useful. It would have taken a minute amount of effort to wire up the necessary software for Hera to run the deep space scans that were assigned to Eiffel, programming her to scan sections of the sky and record any frequency anomalies, but they hadn't. That had been assigned to Communications Officer Douglas (Doug) Eiffel. The job had belonged to him. Now, however, everything belonging to him was now Hera's, due to Eiffel's own request. Now it was her job, and she didn't know how she could possibly do it alone.

            However, if it was hers, it was also hers to do with what she wanted.

            That gave her an idea. She found her way back to Eiffel's room, examining the space. A moment later the room was deadlocked and all points of possible ventilation were blocked off from the rest of the station. There would be a small section of roots from the plant monster that would probably be lost, but that was a non-issue. The creature had never taken any damage caused to it out on her, even though more incidents than she cared to admit recently were her fault. But it had no way of knowing that She was the one flushing the air out of rooms or vents or dropping temperatures below livable conditions or... well, anything else that could cause unfortunate loss of a few stray roots or spikes or tentacles.

            It only took a spark, as long as the oxygen levels were high enough. She'd figured that out sometime during the first month of the mission. Okay, she'd known that from the first time Eiffel had tried to light a cigarette in his office and permanently scorched the control panel within the first week.

            A quick overload of the overhead lights would be enough to cause the bulb to burst, and a spark would catch the air just fine. That would cause enough of an inferno to destroy everything associated with the late Communications Officer Douglas Eiffel. The last thing he'd have wanted was for anything to fall into Commander Minkowski's hands, and god forbid Hilbert get any sort of experimental samples from his favorite test subject post mortem. Yes, a complete cleanse was what Eiffel would have wanted. At least, that's what Hera told herself as she prepared to reroute power to the lighting system within the room.

            There was a high buzz, then a spark, and then the mental buzz of a fire warning paired with an alarm through the station. Hera watched the room, waiting for the oxygen to catch fully and fire to consume what was left of Douglass Eiffel, but she was surprised to see there was no visible flame in his room. Maybe it was still in the light fixture, just outside of her view? No, that wasn't it. In the ceiling, then? Again, temperatures there were normal.

            By now Minkowski was yelling something, asking what the alarm was. Hera ignored her, following the buzzing warning to the source of the fire. This was all wrong, that signal was coming from... engineering? Yes, engineering; temperature and visual sensors confirmed.

            Hera's virtual stomach dropped. She'd blown out the wrong light. All that planning and she'd overloaded a light in the wrong section of the ship.

            Her voice screamed in frustration, the sound echoing through Engineering loud enough that even though she hadn't broadcasted it to the entire station, there wasn't a lifeform on it that hadn't heard her. She screamed and yelled and used every curse she came pre programmed with and a few she'd learned from Eiffel and that time Minkowski got her ponytail stuck in one of the treadmills and carried on until the Engineering speakers threatened to blow out.

            And then, Hera started to do something she hadn't known an AI unit could do. She started to cry.

            Not actual tears, mind. She didn't have the uncomfortably liquid body for that, nor the eyes, nor glands of any sort even if she'd wanted to have glands. If sprinklers had been installed in the station those would have made a good substitute, but the fire suppression foam that was being released into the engineering section hardly counted as anything near tears. She made small noises, her voice hitching on itself in a way that mingled with her glitching, but wasn't quite caused by it. _Sobbing_ , she thought. She'd seen some of the crew experience this phenomenon, but she herself had never... never really had cause, or a motive...

            "Hera. Talk to me."

            She took a moment, as if composing herself. "Yes, Commander?"

            Minkowski blinked at the ceiling in the bridge. It was as if she hadn't been expecting a reply. She recovered quickly, however.

            "What's happening? I see there is... well, was, a fire in engineering, but what I find more concerning was your own outburst. Is something wrong?"

            Hera could tell Minkowski regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth, but that didn't stop the anger from rising to the surface of Hera's emotion core immediately.

            "Wrong? Wro- **Wrong**? Oh, nothing, aside from the fact that Eif-fel is **dead,** comman-mander, and on top of that little mishap, it turns out I can-can't even find the right **light,** and now I'm expected to-to keep the **rest** of this crew alive **somehow,** and I don't... I can't..." Her voice trailed off in a hiccup and she waited for Minkowski to put it together that she'd tried to start a fire in the station, waited for Minkowski to demand she transfer the life support over to her so she wouldn't muck it up like she'd mucked up everything else in this distant hellhole, waited for Minkowski to say some verbal command that would flip her systems back to manual and banish her to the depths of her own coding.

            Instead, Minkowski looked away, wiping one eye on the sleeve of her jumpsuit. She kept her arm there for a few moments, obscuring her face. Hera noticed that her shoulders were shaking slightly, as were her hands. Hera noticed that there was a glistening blob clinging to one of Minkowski's cheeks, and she tried to soak it into the fabric of her sleeve.

            "Dammit," the commander mumbled, trying to blink the growing blob away. She let out a kind of breathy laugh that was almost a sob. "I don't know how he did this all the time. I feel like my eyeballs are going to float out."

            "Usually he'd make clouds out-out of his," commented Hera. "He'd flick them away from his eyes and k-kinda poke at them sadly." She paused. "I had to vacuum them up into water-ter recycling before they'd hit any major circuit-uitry."

            Minkowski laughed again. "God," she breathed. "Five."

            Hera wasn't sure what to make of that until she remembered. She dug up Pryce and Carter and recited "Remain positive at a-all times. Maintain a cheerful attitude even in the face adversity. Remem-member: when you are smiling the whole world smiles with you, but when you're crying you're in violation of fleet-wide morale code-codes and should report to your superior officer for disciplinary a-a-action."

            Minkowski nodded, comparing Hera's recital to her own mental log. "Always was adept at breaking the rules. Never could be bothered to learn them, but, breaking them..." She had a fond kind of smile on her face, though it faded, slowly. "What he say to you? When... when I went to get my Propulsion Maneuvering-" She stopped, and a tiny smile graced her lips. "My jetpack thingy. When I went to get my jetpack thingy and..."

            And found that there wasn't enough tether to reach him, or enough power in the propulsion unit to escape the gravity of the star at that distance, or any way to reach Eiffel without dooming both of them. These things went unspoken between the two of them.

            "I know I have no right to ask this, but... I know you two exchanged words. Before we lost radio contact." Minkowski hesitated. "I just... was wondering what they were."

            His last words.

            Of course she knew his last words. Well, his last words that were heard. God only knew he could have been muttering obscure references all the way to the core of the star, but the helmet com wasn't strong enough to get those words back to the station. He'd been apprehensive, then joking, then plain terrified, and he even had a moment of tears in which Hera wasn't sure he'd be able to prevent drowning (again) in the suit. And then he'd been... strange. He kept making sure Hera could hear him. Making sure he wasn't out of range, but not saying anything, really. Just every few seconds "Hera?" "Can you hear me?" "Are you still there?" and she'd respond with "Yes, Eiffel." "I'm here, Eiffel." "I can hear you, Eiffel." Each time she thought he'd say something else. He'd suck in a breath, wait a moment, then slowly let it back out, hesitate, and ask her again.

            And then, again, he said "Hera," but his voice had been different this time.

            "Yes, Eiffel?"

            "I love you."

            Something had gone cold in Hera's wiring. He couldn't have meant it. He was joking, of course. The threat of death was going to his head and he couldn't have possibly-

            He'd meant it. Oh, God, he'd meant it.

            She'd felt affection for him, sure. Maybe not at first, with him slinking around and calling her creepy and telling her to shut up mid sentence, but hundreds upon hundreds of days with someone could make you start to feel close to them. And he was the only one who had ever really noticed when she was upset, or treated her like more than just the autopilot, more than just a mass of wires and code. In fact, he'd treated her well. Like a friend. Like... more? He'd called her baby, sometimes. What else? Darling? Other pet names she didn't have time to remember.

            His words still hung heavy and demanded a response.

            She could pretend she hadn't heard. Feign static. Eiffel did it all the time, how hard would it be? Or, worse, she could pretend he'd just gone out of range. Refuse to respond at all. Let that be the last thing between them.

            No, she couldn't possibly. It was beyond her to be that cruel.

            Of course an AI could love. That was a non-issue. She could experience emotions as vividly as anyone else, she was sure. But did she love him? She'd never though about it. She'd heard about different types of love; they were wrapped up somewhere in her database for use on cataloguing interpersonal relationships of crewmembers. She was 97.8% sure the love that Eiffel had referred to was romantic. Eros. She was more sure that her own feelings didn't fit into that category. Phileo, perhaps? Or Agape, or Storge? But Eiffel wouldn't understand those words. He didn't seem the type to be read up on Greek philosophies on affection. And her current emotions were too full of flighty panic and dread to sort out anything beyond the fact that the idea of losing Eiffel scared her now more than just about anything else she'd ever experienced.

            "Hera?" he called, the questions in his tone pulling at emotional receptors Hera didn't even know she had. And that twinge of doubt she heard there was what made her do it.

            "I l-l-love you, too, Officer Eif-ffe-ffel," she said, putting everything she could into making it sound like the most genuine thing she'd ever said.

            "Hera," Eiffel repeated, worry lacing his tone. "Can you hear me? Do you copy?"

            "Eiffel? Eiffel, yes, I hear you. Do you read me?" called Hera desperately.

            "Hera! Hephaestus, **anyone** , do you copy?" Panic was clear in his voice as static began to obscure his weakening signal. "Can anybody hear me?"

            "Yes! Eiffel, Doug, I hear you! I can hear you!"

            The next transmission was garbled beyond recognition, and after a few seconds there was nothing but empty static on his line.

            Hera screamed on the channel for as long as she could hear the life support signal from his suit.

            Minkowski was looking at one of the speakers, a vague worry on her face. She was surely about to repeat her question, but Hera didn't want to hear it twice.

            "He asked if I-I could hear him," Hera said. "That was the last thing that came through."

            Minkowski stared a moment longer, then looked at the floor. Her shoulders shook slightly, and for a moment Hera thought she was crying again. Then, she thought Minkowski might be laughing. As it turned out, she was doing both.

            "If course he did. Of course," she said around hysterical half sobs half laughs. "Why wouldn't he?"

            "Comm-mmander?" Hera asked softly, unsure how to handle her in this state.

            "I just... I don't know why, I though he might've... I don't know. Said something... given us closure. God **damn** , isn't that selfish? A man is dead and I though his last words would have made **us** feel better?" She laughed forcefully. "Ha!"

            "Commander," Hera said, unsure of what else she could say.

            Minkowski shook her head. "I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry, Hera. I'm so sorry."

            "It, it's not your fau-fault," assured Hera. "It's nobody's fault."

            "I okayed him to do the space walk. I could have told him not to."

            "And I told him that conditions were optimal. Neither o-of us knew better," Hera comforted her. She hadn't forgiven herself yet, but saying it made it feel like it could have been true. Maybe someday she could believe that there was nothing she could have done differently.

            "How are we going to get through this?" whispered Minkowski.

            Hera knew the question was rhetorical, but still she knew if she didn't answer she wouldn't find a way to make it through the rest of the day, let alone however long they would be left on this station.

            "Together," she said, knowing as she did how cheesy it sounded. She forced a smile into her voice as she affirmed "Eiffel would have wanted it that way."

 


End file.
